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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, actions, searches, let alone regexes etc.

They exist... But it feels FB has gone out of its way to hide and obfuscate them.

Is my experience weird?

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FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches.

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I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant.

Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.

G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though?

Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading.

That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?).

I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.

Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1]

"Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly.

[1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on.

Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.

+1 for topics. Conceptually, pub sub. Maybe also give publisher to have the ability to choose an access policy for their topics (anybody can join, exclude some, only requests I accept).

Circles were trivially shareable though. It made it super easy to create... Well, circles of friends :). These are the 15 of us into computers, 12 of us into photography, 6 of us into dnd, whatever.

And then the best feature of all, Sharing of curated circles. A kind of competitive marketplace of topic related circles emerged so you could find these amazing circles of photographers or musicians etc. Best of all you ingested and then owned that (instance of) circle.

I don't think that's true about FB convincing people to over-share. That may have been true years ago (Bob's relationship status has changed to single!) but these days I get warnings and stuff whenever I set anything to public, and all the defaults are friends only.

Facebook got sued a whole bunch. Between the FTC's various privacy-related consent decrees, Cambridge Analytica, and the GDPR, they functionally can't do the whole "push people to overshare" thing anymore.

I will say though, it's specifically the old Facebook mentality that made me hyped back when Google+ was announced. And then it crashed and burned - which was exactly the point in time where I stopped wanting to be on literally any new social network.

What Fediverse projects have something analogous to G+ Circles? Based on some quick searching, the only one I could find is Bonfire's "Boundaries": https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/

> Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level.

>Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social media (i.e. who can see your content) and include a long list of verbs in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social network.

I agree, G+ system was more explicit, and I preferred it. FB has done the usual modern thing of hiding features so that the less technical users don't worry about them. Perhaps cowardly; I think even someone struggling with tech (parents, grandparents..) would have learned G+ if it really took off.

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